Chapter 11 New Societies and Cultures
11.1 Holistic Economics
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The economic history of the world is the entire history of the world, but seen from a certain vantage point; that of the economy. The ecological history of the world is the history of the world seen from an environmental viewpoint. Increasingly, this
environmental viewpoint takes in the place of Homo sapiens in the entire cosmos. To choose one or other vantage point, and no other, is of course to favour from the start a one-sided form of explanation. However, economists and historians have stopped thinking of economics as a self-contained discipline and of economic history as a neatly defined body of knowledge, which one could study in isolation from other subjects. Economists cannot properly grasp economic phenomena unless they go beyond the economy. With regard to political economy, which in the 19th century appeared to concern only material goods, it has turned out to embrace the social system as a whole, being related to everything in society. The same can be said of biologists with respect to ecology, with its history of evolution, which is no longer regarded as primarily science, but as a philosophy of inter-relatedness.
Political culture is an important variable in the analysis of the relationships between culture and ecology as it suggests underlying beliefs, values and opinions, which a group of people holds dear (such as shared ethnic and religious affinities). For example, Catholicism treats the individual as social and transcendent.
Economics and ecology come together at their common linguistic root, ‘oikos’, which in both cases signifies a space where a complex of activities is undertaken concerned with the consumption of natural resources and their transformation for production and distribution.
11.1.1 Management
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Solidarity in human societies resides in the organisations established to manage the utilisation of natural resources. Management, as a specific pattern of human activities, emerges in the archaic use of the word economy to define the ordering of household affairs; (via Latin from Greek oikonomia; domestic management, from oikos house + -nomia, from nemein to manage). Managerial behaviour, involves the setting of targets and the marshalling of inputs necessary to overcome limiting environmental factors. It is central to activities that turn environmental resources into food, goods and services.
Ecology comes from the same etymological root. As a human scientific endeavour it
has prompted new institutions and organisations in society by which ecological thinking can be directed to manage ecosystems as human goods. In this respect, applied ecology is a powerful feedback from science to force cultural changes in the use of habitats and species.
Tension within society comes, on the one hand, from the managerial applications of science for the commodification and industrialisation of nature, and on the other, to the applications of ecology for the preservation of intrinsic value in the living world.
These two rival views of the relationship between humans and nature define the area of cultural ecology.
From all of these viewpoints, applied ecology is influencing the formation of new social organisations and their cultural expressions through managerialism as global and local strategies and site operations. Some of these changes in society and culture come about because of direct applications of science. However, other movements, such as 'deep ecology', with their promotion of intrinsic value in ecological order, do not come directly out of the science of ecology, but are suggested, inspired and fortified, by ecological ideas. In native cultures their ideological aspects comprised beliefs, rituals, magical practices, art, ethics, religion and myths. These defined the permissible and acceptable relationships with nature, and they were part of local systems for conserving resources. In industrialised societies this role has been taken over by the cultural package of 'nature conservation', which includes the philosophies and legal systems of society directed at supporting order in habitats and their species.
This is the web of perception and action that locks individuals together in geographical space as societies. It is focused on balancing the exploitation of environmental
resources for production with the conservation of resources to ensure survival of the community. This balancing act involves technological, sociological and ideological management systems.
The technological aspect of management is concerned with tools, materials and machines. The sociological aspect involves the relationships into which people enter especially in work and in the family. These two aspects encompass topics that deal respectively with the exploitation of resources through production and demand.
Changes in technology and social organisation will bring forth changes in the ideas and beliefs that connect people with local and planetary resources, and also define humans in the wider cosmos, but such ideas will always feed back on the social organisation, which moves forward.
The ideological aspects of the conservation of resources are expressed
• through ideas about 'nature' and 'place', as these have developed historically to provide philosophical, artistic and spiritual values for present day
environmentalism;
• through science, as applied ecology;
• and through ‘living in nature’ and applying traditional ecological knowledge to realise global and local strategies of resource management.
All these aspects define the two major routes of Western reasoning about nature. On the one hand, since the 18th century, there has been a ready acceptance of the scientific drive for the domination of nature. On the other hand, the environmental
outcomes of this mode of activity has precipitated the ecological search for intrinsic value and its preservation. These two rival views of the relationship between humans and nature define a fluid mind-map to steer a global society toward sustainability. The rivalry comes from fragmentation of civil society in the pursuit of profit and status.
Only as conscious agents of a cultural revolution, which promotes a balanced
synthesis of the exploitative and conserving segments of society, can we harness our species' ecological potential for a sustainable future.
The twentieth century opened with a revolution in humankind’s attitude to the environment. It sprang spontaneously from all branches of culture and from all countries across a Europe. The discoveries of Einstein in outer space corresponded with those of Jung into the inner space of the subconscious. Biology began to shape the modern perspective of our place in nature. The arts themselves exploded into a new environmental dimension. No longer was the inquiring mind satisfied with appearance. Scientists and artists began to define the relationship between people and environment that was more comprehensive than the search for natural
resources. Thus artists, such as Paul Klee and Jean Miro, set out to combine the invisible with the visible, the abstract with the figurative. They let themselves be invaded by the living world and then processed it in a very subjective manner.
11.1.2 The Cosmic Adventure
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There are profound connections between stars, atoms and life that place human culture in the grand outline of the development of the universe. This perspective has been called the 'cosmic adventure'.
The adventure began in a hot and undifferentiated broth of radiation. Eventually, on our tiny planet in a remote corner of a small galaxy, there developed the incredible complexity of life, consciousness and culture. We now appreciate that the universe has moved toward increasingly more intense forms of ordered novelty. In this respect, we can say that it does have a direction, particularly here on Earth, where there is significantly more ordered variety than there was three minutes after the big bang. We have arrived throughout the fifteen billion years of cosmic development as part of a process that has kept a balance between pairs of primeval qualities. These qualities are:
• harmony and contrast;
• order and unpredictability;
• unity and complexity;
• pattern and nuance;
• homogeneity and diversity;
• stability and novelty.
The existence of the universe and everything in it depends on the internal ordering, or tuning of its components. As far as we can see, it was six numbers imprinted in the 'big bang' that have maintained the trajectory of cosmic ecology as a balance of
qualities. Two of the numbers relate to the basic forces; two fix the size and the overall
texture of the universe and determine whether it will continue forever, and two more fix the properties of space itself. If any one of these numbers was slightly different at the start there would be no stars and no life. Our universe is a rarity with the right combination of the key numbers to ensure that it survives and has developed as an intricately structured whole. Terrestrial evolution is the story of one such molecular outcome, as are the political and technological endeavours of nations of the earth are the social outcomes.
Physics and chemistry existed before human evolution and in this sense they define the non-human purpose of the cosmos as a physico-chemical process. Therefore, in thinking about cosmic purpose we must separate ourselves from the modern bias that nature is a value- neutral canvas. It does not remain blank until we have painted it with our cultural and political inventions. The core of human distinctiveness is that we are capable of thinking about the internal ordering of the universe and our planetary systems so as to understand how these qualities are expressed. We are also able to add value to them.
This attitude has an important bearing on the way we view our social and biological heritage in their cosmic, ecological and social dimensions. There are currently two views about the direction of cosmic development and our place in it. After the
universe was energised from the void, the ordering of novelty followed the sequence of energy, particles, stars, planets, materials and life forms. Process theology takes the view that a programme of development according to divine will governed the
direction. Process humanism takes the view that our universe is just one of an infinity of universes bubbling up at random from the void. Most would be untuned.
Process theology says that the self-creativity of all constituents of the cosmos willed by God deserve our care because they are especially intense actualisations of divinely inspired creativity and cosmic beauty. When nature suffers, God suffers.
Process humanism says that to gain an appropriate sense of our human worth we need to become aware of our creative potential to work towards global order.
Therefore, intervention to maintain a balance of qualities that define our biological and social heritage, by ordering novelty and unifying complexity, is actually a small part of the grand cosmic purpose.
Both points of view provide us with a knowledge framework for applying ecological thinking to culture that is deeply rooted in cosmology. Also, they recapture the ancient spiritual sense that we live in a meaningful and intrinsically valuable world and do so in a manner entirely consonant with contemporary science. Humanity's origins and practical capabilities require it to participate in sustaining the cosmic process as a balance of qualities that define our place in nature as much as our attitudes to the use of nature expressed in technology, art, architecture and literature. In particular, this vision involves recognising that conservation of biodiversity is not just for humans or valueless apart from them.